Sweden Is Now Home To A ‘Mansplaining’ Hotline For Frustrated Coworkers

Everyone has at least one. That coworker (or coworkers) who insist on butting in to conversations that they have no part in to correct minor details or explain something that doesn’t need to be explained. There’s nothing you can usually say to them to get them to stop, or to understand that even if you might flub a few small details in your back and forth that it isn’t their job to show you up and act as fact checker extraordinaire. It puts a real damper on the workday.

Now, Sweden has a solution for that issue in the form of a mansplaining hotline that people can use to vent all of their frustrations about office mansplainers. Sponsored by the Swedish workers’ union Unionen, the hotline is only temporary as of now but is open to both men and woman who want to let loose a little bit about the people at work who make every day just a little too filled with fact tweaking. While the men calling might be more inclined to insist that well, actually, they were just providing a little bit of insight to their conversations and no one should be complaining about that, this sounds like a more than overdue option for women to have some stress relief.

The people offering advice on the calls are trained gender experts or come from other fields completely like authors or professors. Women have already been calling looking for guidance on how to speak up in the face of mansplaining, so the “temporary” nature of the hotline may not be so short-liked after all. Just in case it does shut down after one week, women of Sweden should get that venting in this week. Otherwise you might be stuck in the office wanting to blow your top the next time somebody clarifies that Germany is indeed bigger than Poland by 13,000 square miles and that should be reflected in your important vacation story.

Then why do you have to put a specific gender on a thing that exists? It’s called condescension, and it goes both ways, but feminist professors, bloggers, and journalists get people around them who don’t profit to believe their propoganda because they want to create an ideological “other” just like racists vilify cultural the cultural “other.” Using words like privilege and mansplaining are just another form of prejudice, of pre-loading terms with racial and gender-based connotations, in the same way that old people use the term “thug.”

You are putting up walls instead of bridges with these terms, only adding to a conflict where people choose to use terms that do not jive together, that says “it’s not your time anymore.” But guess what? That “your” doesn’t include us. Our generation didn’t do this. Our generation didn’t establish “the patriarchy”, we were all born after that shit just like all the people who pretend like we’re evil, racist scum for having a cock between our legs. We aren’t down for that shit either, but when prejudice and bullying are used against us, how do you think we’re going to react to the people who use these loaded terms?

There are real problems out there, rape on campus, sexual harassment in the workplace, real discrimination. Those do exist, and I want to join in the fight against them. But when you say that expressing my point of view matters less because I’m a man, well, you’ve done your cause a major disservice.

@Steve Bramucci A thing that exists? There are trillions of “things that exist.” When you write about one of them almost every single day from the a certain perspective then it starts to look like an agenda. At what point are clicks worth the divisiveness this sort of article and the language in it causes.

Interesting how Steve? These kinds of articles are hypocritical at best and not in line with uproxx’ agenda. If you’re going to push an agenda as hard as you do then you need to expect criticism for featuring regressive language